Stream listening slipped 3% in September, according to the Triton Digital Webcast Metrics Top 20 Ranker, pulled down by Pandora’s key listening metric which dropped 4% from August. Overall webcast listening in Triton’s top-20 cohort stayed level from the same month last year.
As always, RAIN views the information through the lens of 6am – midnight, Monday through Sunday. The key metric is Average Active Sessions (AAS), which measures the average number of simultaneous listeners. Pandora is the heavy hitter in this metric, typically registering at least six times as much stream listening as second-place iHeartRadio. September was Pandora’s fifth consecutive month-on-month decline.
Spotify, which had led the group for a year, left the Ranker service at the start of 2019. Year-over-year comparisons are distorted by that exit. But if we remove Spotify’s numbers from the group total for June 2018, we see level streaming volume up two percent from a year ago.
Here are RAIN’s leader trendlines from Sep. 2009 through June of this year:
(We are leaving the Spotify line in place as an important part of the nearly 10-year RAIN/Webcast Metrics record.)